Ramanujam of Kabilan Street kept a notebook. It was a long, narrow notebook with a marbled cover, the kind sold at the Lalgudi Stores for six annas in better times. On its first page, in his careful clerk's hand, he had written: To Be Undertaken When Conditions Improve.
Below this heading was a list that had grown over eleven years. He would take up yoga when his backache was cured. He would start a savings account when the raise came through. He would speak firmly to his son Kittu when Kittu was old enough to listen, though Kittu was now twelve and seemed to be getting less able to listen every year. He would write to his wife when she came to her senses. She had gone to her mother's house in Talapur three weeks before, over a matter that both of them, if pressed, would have had difficulty explaining. It had begun with the price of tamarind and ended with a remark about his mother, and the trunk had come down from the loft the same evening.
So Ramanujam waited. He waited at the Cooperative Bank on Market Road, where for nineteen years he had sat at the same desk under the same ceiling fan, which turned so slowly that the flies rode on it. He waited at home, where the cook Muniamma left his rice on a plate and went off muttering. Mostly he waited for that unspecified morning when all his difficulties would be removed together and his real life could begin.
That morning certainly did not arrive on the Wednesday this story is about.
He woke to find the tap dry. The Municipality, it was understood, had ideas of its own about water. He bathed out of a bucket Muniamma had filled the previous night, and the cold water went straight to the small of his back. He groaned. Kittu, lying on the mat with a cricket magazine, did not look up.
"Kittu, your examinations are next month."
"Yes, Appa."
"Then why that magazine?"
"It is about Gavaskar, Appa. It is educational."
Ramanujam opened his mouth, felt his back, and closed it again. That conversation was in the notebook, under When Kittu is older.
At the bus stand near the Town Hall a crowd stood about in that pleasant idleness which in Lalgudi always meant a strike. The drivers wanted something, the management wanted something else, and the public, as usual, wanted only the bus. A man selling groundnuts was doing good business. Ramanujam calculated that it was two miles to the bank, sighed the long sigh of a man whom the universe has once again singled out, and began to walk.
He had not gone a furlong when the strap of his left chappal gave way.
He stood on one foot in the middle of Market Road, holding the ruined chappal and looking so tragic that a bullock-cart driver slowed down to look at him. There was a cobbler under the banyan tree at the corner. Everybody in Lalgudi knew him and nobody knew his name. He sat on a gunny sack surrounded by bits of leather, tins of nails, and a last worn smooth by forty years of other people's feet. Ramanujam limped over and held out the chappal like evidence in a court case.
The cobbler turned it over. "Strap has gone, sir."
"I can see that."
"Leather is old."
"I know it is old. Can you mend it or not?"
The cobbler said nothing. He reached into a heap of scraps at his side, odd bits of hide in brown and black and one alarming red, and picked out a strip that did not match the chappal in any respect. He measured it against the old strap with his thumb, cut it with a curved knife, and began to stitch. His needle went in and out with a little grunt each time.
Ramanujam squatted on his heels to wait. His back protested and he ignored it out of pride. "Business must be bad," he said for something to say. "With the strike, nobody is walking. Everybody is standing."
"Today, people are walking, sir," said the cobbler without looking up. "Walking, chappals break. Good day."
Ramanujam had not thought of it that way. He looked at the heap of scraps. "You keep all these old pieces?"
"What to do with them? Throw away? Somebody's sandal breaks. I have only these. I stitch with these."
"But they don't match."
The cobbler shrugged, a shrug that took in the banyan tree, the strike, the Municipality and the whole condition of mankind. "Sir, if I wait for matching leather, I will wait. Meanwhile, you are standing on one leg."
He bit off the thread, tested the strap with a sharp tug, and handed the chappal back. It now had one brown strap and one black. It looked as if it had been put together by a committee. It held.
"Four annas," said the cobbler.
Ramanujam paid, put on the chappal, and walked on. He walked rather slowly, and it was not because of his back.
He reached the bank forty minutes late. The Manager, a man named Sriram who had been to Madras once and never let anyone forget it, was waiting at the counter. "Mr. Ramanujam! Bus strike or no bus strike, the ledgers do not know about strikes!"
On any other day Ramanujam would have gone to his desk in silent grievance and spent the morning writing a reply to Sriram in his head. Today, for reasons he could not have explained, he found himself looking at the bundle of files on the corner of his desk. These were the reconciliation statements for the Agricultural Loans section. For two years they had been waiting for "the new clerk," a person who had been promised every April and had never come. The files had been there so long that a cockroach had set up a household in the lower layers.
He took the top file, blew the dust off it, and opened it.
It was dull work, very dull, and full of the handwriting of men long since transferred to Kumbum and Trichy. But he found he did not mind. By four o'clock he had finished nine statements. Sriram passed his desk twice and said nothing, which from Sriram was practically a garland.
There was no raise, of course. That would have been a different kind of story.
He walked home in the evening, since the strike was now in its second, philosophical stage, in which the two sides had stopped talking and started giving interviews to the Lalgudi Times. He passed the post office and stopped. He went in and bought a postcard, sat on the bench by the counter where people wrote their money-order forms, and took out his pen.
He wrote: My dear Kamala, and then stopped for a long time.
The first draft explained, at some length, about the tamarind. He tore it up, which cost him another postcard. The second draft explained about his mother, and he tore that up too. The third was dignified and the fourth was pathetic. The fifth said only:
The tap is dry. Muniamma's rasam is a crime. Kittu is reading about Gavaskar. My back is the same. I am the same also, but I am sorry. Come home when you like. —R.
He posted it before he could change his mind and stood outside the post office feeling he had done something reckless, like a man who has just jumped into the Kollidam river in November.
When he reached Kabilan Street, Kittu was playing cricket in the road with three other boys. The stumps were a kerosene tin and the bat had been broken and splinted with string, rather like a certain chappal. Ramanujam stood at the gate and watched. He felt the old sentence rising in him (Kittu, your examinations) and let it pass, the way one lets a bus pass that is going somewhere else.
"Give me the bat," he said.
The boys stared at him as if a lamp-post had asked to play. Kittu handed it over with deep suspicion. Ramanujam took his stance in front of the kerosene tin, bent his knees as far as his back would allow, which was not far, and faced the bowling of a boy called Ravi. Ravi took a run-up that started somewhere near the temple.
The first ball hit the tin with a clang that brought Muniamma to the window. The second he missed altogether. The third, by some miracle of physics, he struck clean, and it sailed over the Iyengar house opposite and was not seen again.
There was a long silence. Then Kittu said, in a voice his father had not heard from him in years, "Appa! Sixer!"
They lost the ball, naturally. Ramanujam paid for a new one. That night his back was worse than ever, and he lay on the mat with a hot-water bottle while Kittu, unprompted (genuinely unprompted, which deserves recording), sat beside him and read out his history lesson aloud. They both stumbled over the Mauryan Empire together.
Before he slept, Ramanujam took out the marbled notebook and opened it to the first page: To Be Undertaken When Conditions Improve. He read down the list. The backache, the raise, the son, the wife. He sat for a while with the pen in his hand.
Then he turned to a fresh page and wrote at the top, in his careful clerk's hand: Today.
He could not immediately think of anything to write under it, so he put the notebook away. It was enough of a beginning for one Wednesday.
Kamala's reply came on Saturday. It said only that she would be on the Monday train, and that he was to get the tap seen to. He did not, of course; the tap was the Municipality's business. But he was at the station on Monday half an hour early, wearing a chappal with one brown strap and one black. When she remarked on it, he said it was the fashion in Madras.